A Weblog by One Humble Bookman on Topics of Interest to Discerning Readers, Including (Though Not Limited To) Science Fiction, Books, Random Thoughts, Fanciful Family Anecdotes, Publishing, Science Fiction, The Mating Habits of Extinct Waterfowl, The Secret Arts of Marketing, Other Books, Various Attempts at Humor, The Wonders of New Jersey, the Tedious Minutiae of a Boring Life, Science Fiction, No Accounting (For Taste), And Other Weighty Matters.

Who Is This Hornswoggler?

Andrew Wheeler is a Vassar alum, class of 1990. He spent 16 years as a bookclub editor (mostly for the Science Fiction Book Club), and then moved into marketing. He marketed books and related products to accountants for Wiley for eight years, and now works for Thomson Reuters as Senior Marketer for Corporate Counsel. He was a judge for the 2005 World Fantasy Awards and the 2008 Eisner Awards. He also reviewed a book a day for a year twice. He lives with The Wife and two mostly tame sons (Thing One, born 1998; and Thing Two, born 2000) at an unspecified location in suburban New Jersey. He has been known to drive a minivan, and nearly all of his writings are best read in a tone of bemused sarcasm. Antick Musings’s manifesto is here. All opinions expressed here are entirely and purely those of Andrew Wheeler, and no one else.

Tuesday, April 08, 2014

You might know someone who thinks comics can't be good books -- that there's something about sticking words and pictures together that inherently degrades both of them, turning the final product into junk no matter whose words and whose pictures. [1] The work of Taiyo Matsumoto includes some of the best counterexamples available: he tells mostly quiet stories about real people, built up through closely observed behavior, leaving the reader to infer most of his major points of characterization. And his art is subtly impressionistic: not quite mimicking life, but a little bigger and truer than that.

Either of the first two stories in Sunny, Vol. 2 would work well to introduce that skeptic: the first focuses on Kiko (red-faced and helmet-haired, clearly shown to be the less attractive of the two girls of her age), who we can see craves attention, though Matsumoto never actually says that. And she gets her opportunity, though it doesn't go the way she would like. The second story is even more moving, mirroring the first story from Volume 1 (see Day 80) -- but, this time, it's Sei, the bookish baseball-capped boy, who is showing around a new child to the Star Kids Home, telling the younger boy in the same words he heard the details of the house and explaining that he needs to keep believing his mother will come back and take him away. This episode is nearly a Raymond Carver story in comics form: precise, focused, entirely about things it never says but clearly illuminates, down to a perfect last page.

This volume has six stories, each of which focuses on a different child at the home. Their stories are all different, all sad in their own ways, but all true and all different. Each one contains wonders; each one is a polished gem of observation and presentation, showing the lives of these boys and girls in the mid-70s, each cast off by their parents and trying to move on in this new place.

Sunny is a quietly magnificent achievement, a triumph of ordinariness and regular life in a medium that so often treasures bombast and fakery. This is the real deal: comics that can stand up to any other medium of world art and hold its ground there.

[1] Such a person might not exist outside of rhetoric anymore, I admit. But there are a lot of people with unreasoning literary prejudices, so I don't believe this one is entirely dead.